Mohd Izham Bin Hassan graduated from the Southern New Hampshire University, USA with a Bachelor of Science Degree Majoring in Economics & Finance in May 1990. Having started his career in the banking sector with Maybank, he moved on to join one of the biggest plantation companies in Malaysia heading the insurance unit. Among his responsibilities were the procurement of the group insurance requirement and to ensure adequacy of cover for company’s risk exposure. Due to his knowledge in this field, he was assigned to the committee to set up the Enterprise Wide Risk Management (EWRM) programme for the company.
He was also assigned to conduct research on production, compile data on estate land bank and liaise with regulatory bodies on submission of monthly statistics. He has more than 15 years of experience in the plantation industry and prior to joining Malaysian Palm Oil Council, he was the Head of the Statistics Department of a major insurance company in Malaysia. He has presented papers at MPOC organised seminars in Philippines, Myanmar, Vietnam and Singapore. He is currently the Manager, Marketing & Market Development Division at Malaysian Palm Oil Council (MPOC) responsible for market movement of global oils and fats.

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The total global soybean production in 2013 season was expected to be 288 million MT. Out of this amount, the production from the G3 soybean producers, USA, Brazil and Argentina plays a crucial role. These three countries together produced 233 million MT or 80% of the global production.

The most interesting development in 2013 was the production by Brazil which came to 89 million MT, thus overtaking the USA as the biggest soybean producer in the world. The USA has historically been the biggest soybean producer in the world and the performance by Brazil was certainly impressive. Among the reasons for this development was the favourable weather in South America prompting higher plantings and harvesting in Brazil and farmers in the USA preference for corn as opposed to soybean due to better prices.

This paper will look into the various aspects in the prospects of the development of soybean production in the G3 countries in 2014. An overview of previous production patterns will be presented and will give our forecast an the role the G3 soybean production will play in the global oils & fats development in 2014.